The last episode of The Valley Pod for 2025 features Alamosa Police Chief George Dingfelder. He brings into the studio with him Police Capt. Brandon Bertsch, a native of Alamosa and now head of code enforcement and investigations for Alamosa PD.
With violent crime in Alamosa down 28 percent year-over-year, the episode gets into the drug trade and the impacts drug addiction and drug distribution have on the city and the greater San Luis Valley.
“I grew up here,” Bertsch says in the episode. “I feel like drug addiction and just the spread of drug distribution has always been one of the biggest problems, which again has its own effects on property crime and everything else that goes on the city, unfortunately.”
Dingfelder mentions a recent Alamosa Police bust that netted nine pounds of fentanyl, or 60,000 pills. “That’s one pill that potentially could kill every person in the San Luis Valley and half the dogs,” the police chief says.
The use of artificial intelligence technology becomes a topic of conversation, with both Dingfelder and Bertsch noting the effectiveness of technology tools. Both recently attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition in Denver this past October.
“There was a huge discussion,” Dingfelder said of AI in police work. “These are chiefs and sheriffs or chiefs from across the entire world, and there was a ton of conversation about using AI and stuff like that, which is great because it’s really good for analyzing the data and giving you places to go. But at the end of the day, it still comes down to ‘you got to have the human there to follow up on that.’”
As for 2026, increased traffic enforcement along the major roads through Alamosa will be an emphasis. Dingfelder, who has been police chief since May 2024, formerly worked for Colorado State Highway Patrol.
“I’d spent 25 years with state patrol doing nothing but traffic, and I was a little bit amazed at how many crashes we get in this city,” the chief said, noting that Alamosa PD will respond to 300-plus traffic accidents a year.
“It’s kind of frustrating, honestly. We’re 300 to 400 crashes a year in the city. And I think back to my days when I was a sergeant and captain with state patrol overseeing the whole six counties of the Valley…I don’t know that we covered that many crashes in all six counties.”
A traffic study over seven days along Sixth Street through Alamosa, which functions as a state highway eastbound, showed 1,200 people who were driving 10 miles an hour or more over the posted 25 mph speed limit, Dingfelder said.
“I think the fastest that it captured was like 80 in that 25 zone.”
Listen to the episode and subscribe to The Valley Pod for 2026.